Movie stars

Brüno Sacha Baron Cohen’s flamboyant Austrian nincompoop comes to America seeking fame. He throws his barely concealed crotch at the camera and tries to film a sex video with an annoyed Ron Paul. Cohen is looking to exploit the hate that exists in people, but he doesn’t quite find it, and the movie just sputters. (82 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

The End of the Line If you need a movie to club you upside the head with the vast downside of overfishing, hold steady for this documentary, which throws enough data at us in the hope that some of it sticks - or leaves a bruise. (80 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

(500) Days of Summer A gimmicky little romantic comedy with enough charm to get by. It’s your basic boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Zooey Deschanel), boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back again, but director Mark Webb shuffles the scenes out of sequence with sweetness, glib wit, and an awareness of the hero’s passivity. (95 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)

G-Force If you can’t squeeze a decent family movie out of talking 3-D super-agent guinea pigs, you may as well throw in the towel. Despite a high-end cast - Sam Rockwell, Penèlope Cruz, and Tracy Morgan provide the voices - the story line is a mishmash. The very small will like it; others beware. (89 min., PG) (Ty Burr)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Installment six merely gets us one movie closer to the series’ big finale. Harry learns more about Voldemort, the terrorist who killed his parents, and Jim Broadbent arrives as a professor who used to teach Voldemort. Harry and his friends’ hormones suggest the series works better as a collection of teen movies. (153 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)

Humpday Two former college pals, one settled and the other a free spirit, dare each other to have sex on film. The movie’s mostly talk, mostly about a young man’s fear of looking unhip. There are caustic laughs but the limitations of director Lynn Shelton’s low-fi style keep the movie from mattering much. (94 min., R) (Ty Burr)

The Hurt Locker This war film focuses on the work of an Army bomb squad and one particularly gifted soldier (Jeremy Renner), who seems to have no fear of roadside bombs. We see and feel how when James disarms a bomb, it’s almost no different from watching a conductor seduce an orchestra or a chef produce a meal. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

In the Loop A brutally funny political satire about war machinations on both sides of the Atlantic. Director Armando Iannucci amasses a group of boobs, users, and charlatans and asks us to recognize our duly appointed officials. With James Gandolfini as a five-star general. (106 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

One Day You’ll Understand In 1987 France, a businessman discovers that his mother has hidden her Jewish roots from her children. Rich emotional delicacy ensues rather then melodramatic fireworks. Her reticence has its reasons. Directed and co-written by Amos Gitai. (88 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

Orphan Two dumb parents adopt a spookily polite 9-year-old girl who turns out to have a taste for cutlery. As a concept, “Orphan’’ is reprehensible. As a movie, it’s entertaining trash - a good bad movie you can either shriek at, laugh at, or both. (123 min., R) (Ty Burr)

Soul Power The Rumble in the Jungle had a soundtrack. A few weeks before the Ali-Foreman fight, James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, the Spinners, and Miriam Makeba performed in a three-day concert, discussed at the time as the “black Woodstock.’’ Culled from 125 hours of footage, the movie is a random abridgement that entertains despite its tendency to wander through a lot of terrific material. Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte. (93 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)

The Ugly Truth Katherine Heigl in another diet-romantic comedy. She plays a TV news producer who accepts dating advice from the chauvinist Neanderthal (Gerard Butler) her station has just hired. The movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. (97 min., R) (Wesley Morris)

Unmistaken Child An eerie, moving documentary about the selection of a young Nepalese boy as the reincarnation of a Buddhist master. Filmmaker Nati Baratz observes dispassionately, with few resorts to voice-over narration and the like, and the results both convey lasting mysteries and raise further questions. In English, Tibetan, Nepali, and Hindi, with subtitles. (102 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

The Windmill Movie A remarkable documentary about a deceased Harvard film professor named Richard P. Rogers that attempts to reconcile Rogers’s sense of personal, professional, and artistic malaise, which culminated in his decades-long attempt to make a film about his life. He left behind more than 200 hours of footage but no finished movie. One of Rogers’s former students tries, audaciously, to make sense of it all. (95 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

An archive of movie reviews may be found at www.boston.com/movies.

Theaters are subject to change.